Running for the sake of running

Almost ten years ago, I wrote an article titled Choosing the Right Path (in spanish: Escoger el camino correcto.)

I published it on LinkedIn and I remember it resonated with quite a few colleagues. I wrote it during a particularly frustrating period. I had been working for months on a project where design was treated as a superficial layer. Important decisions were being made before the problem was properly understood. Talking about users was almost an inconvenience. Research was seen as something that slowed things down. Difficult questions were unwelcome. What mattered was moving forward.

And it was a constant struggle between our team and the people funding the project. In other words, the people paying for the work did not understand the value of design. Or perhaps they understood it perfectly well and simply did not care. Either way, it shaped the project in ways that are difficult to explain unless you have lived through it yourself.

Personas

Back then, I had already been following Alan Cooper for several years. I discovered his work at university and, like many designers of my generation, I was fascinated by his work on Personas. I know the method has its critics. Cooper himself has explained how the tool was distorted over time: in some organizations, people stopped creating personas based on real users and started inventing them to justify what engineers had already decided to build.

Many mediocre projects turned personas into exactly that: an empty template, another deliverable inside poorly conceived processes. But when used properly, it remains one of the most powerful tools I know for creating empathy and forcing us to see the world from the perspective of the people who will actually use what we are building.

Cooper was always on my radar, and around that time I came across a talk of his that stayed with me for weeks. He spoke about questioning assumptions, understanding people’s real goals, and the responsibility we carry as designers when we help shape systems.

I clearly remember the feeling of empowerment I had while listening to it. Designers can be a bit dramatic at times, and we often believe we have the solution to every problem in the world. That talk made me feel that I was not wrong for insisting on asking uncomfortable questions. That taking the time to understand a problem before jumping into solutions was not a waste of time. That putting people at the center was neither an academic luxury nor a passing trend.

And perhaps most importantly, it helped me accept that there was little value in spending so much energy trying to convince organizations that were simply not interested in listening.

Shortly afterwards, I wrote that article.

And the people?

Ten years later, I still think Cooper was right, but there is an important nuance: the landscape has changed.

Today, very few people openly question the value of design. Research is part of every strategic conversation. User experience has a seat at the table. We talk about innovation, product thinking, digital transformation and, more recently, AI agents. On paper, many of the debates we were having back then seem to be settled.

And yet, one idea from that talk has never stopped following me.

“Don’t rush in the wrong direction.”

The problem was never that we were moving too slowly. The problem was moving without asking where we were going. And today, we move faster than ever.

We automate processes. We generate content. We build products. We add artificial intelligence to systems that we barely understood before introducing yet another layer of complexity. We measure more things than ever before and, paradoxically, it becomes harder every day to distinguish what truly deserves our attention.

Last week, a conversation at the studio brought all of this back to mind. We were discussing automation, AI agents and how some organizations are starting to rethink processes that have remained essentially unchanged for decades. At first glance, it sounded like good news: fewer repetitive tasks, fewer errors, and less time spent on low-value administrative work.

Then someone made an observation that changed the tone of the conversation.

If automating a process allows the work of ten people to be done by two, what happens to the other eight?

The question was not technological.

It was human.

I realized that my first instinct had been to think about efficiency, while someone else was thinking about consequences. Both perspectives were reasonable. In fact, both were probably necessary. Organizations should be prepared to reassign talent, not simply eliminate it. Automation should free people to do better work, not automatically become a cost-cutting exercise.

But history teaches us that things are rarely that simple.

That was when I thought about Cooper again. Because the conversation was not really about artificial intelligence. It was about direction. About understanding which problem we are actually trying to solve. About what happens when we optimize one part of a system without taking the time to understand the system as a whole.

Principles

Perhaps that is why I care less and less about speed and more and more about direction.

There is nothing particularly admirable about doing something faster if we are not sure it is worth doing in the first place. And there is nothing more dangerous than automating a mistake.

A human error usually has limited impact. An error turned into a process gets replicated. An automated error scales. And an automated error inside a complex system can create consequences that nobody anticipated.

For years we have repeated mantras about moving fast, experimenting, iterating and executing. And there is truth in all of them. But the more complex the systems we build become, the more convinced I am that reflection before action becomes increasingly valuable. Not because thinking is better than acting, but because acting without understanding the problem comes at a growing cost.

And this is precisely where principles matter.

People often simplify judgment as the ability to make good decisions. I believe it is something both simpler and harder than that: knowing what you are not willing to sacrifice, even when circumstances change.

Principles are not for moments when everything is obvious. They are for moments of pressure. When the fastest solution seems the most attractive one. When incentives point in one direction and your intuition points in another. When you still do not know the outcome of a decision, but you already know which lines you are unwilling to cross.

Groucho Marx once said:

“These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.”

The quote works because it is brilliant. And because, deep down, we all recognize the caricature. The ease with which we adapt our convictions when circumstances become uncomfortable.

But there are things the world cannot afford to joke about.

Not when a decision can affect the jobs of hundreds of people. Not when an algorithm shapes what we see and what we do not see. Not when a technology changes the way we learn, work and relate to one another.

Perhaps that is the reflection that interests me most today.

I do not know whether we are moving fast enough.

I do know that this is no longer the real question.

The real question is whether we still have clear principles capable of guiding us toward the direction worth pursuing.

Because uncertainty will never disappear. We will continue making decisions without fully understanding their consequences. We will continue building systems that are more complex than our ability to fully comprehend them. And we will continue making mistakes.

That is why principles matter.

Not because they guarantee that we will be right.

But because they help us maintain our course when we still do not know exactly where we are heading.

Ten years later, I still think Alan Cooper was right:

Don’t rush in the wrong direction.